Sep 30

Sep 30 RELEASE DAY RECOMMENDS : 9.30.2020

RELEASE DAY RECOMMENDS - HEADER - 9_22.png

Every week the publishing industry opens the gates of brand spanking new books and out comes a deluge of new and possibly amazing releases. And every week our Founder and sometimes reviewer, Noah Sanders, will act as your donut-shaped floatation device to keep you and your brainy little head above the waters of what you should read.

This week: murderous rich kids, a Malcolm X biography thirty years in the making, the essential works of Ruth Stone, oh, and more.

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 30th

The Loop
Jeremy Robert Johnson
Saga Press

A few things about myself: teenagers scare me (the peach fuzz, the attitude, etc.), rich teenagers even more, rich teenagers amped up on illicitly spread chemical juice on a gory rampage through the small town I’m happily wiling away my existence in, well, now that’s just the worse. Thus, Jeremy Robert Johnson’s (Skullcrack City) new book The Loop - about a non-juiced group of teens trying to survive the night as a group of decidedly juiced sons and daughters of executives murder their way through a small town - sounds terrifying. But also, super entertaining.

$25 Bookshop

The Dead Are Arising:
The Life of Malcolm X
Les Payne w/ Tamara Payne
Liveright

Pulitzer Prize winning author, Les Payne was already nearly twenty years into the process of researching and writing his end-all biography of Civil Rights pioneer Malcolm X when he passed in 2018. His daughter, Tamara Payne, picked up the torch and now in the midst of some truly necessary social unrest, this door-stopper of a book is finally available. Based on thousands of interviews Payne did with everyone from Nation of Islam members to FBI moles to classmates to friends to everyone who might have known Malcolm X, Les Paynes traces the life of one of the great figures of the 20th Century, correcting notorious historical inaccuracies while placing him in the context of not only the turmoil of The Sixties, but of history itself. A posthumous book from Les Payne is like finding a birthday gift under the couch two years after your birthday, but the birthday gift is a meticulously researched and beautifully written non-fiction encapsulation of an oft times misunderstood figure in modern history.

$33 BOOKSHOP

$25 BOOKSHOP

Jack
Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Sometimes when we watch Marvel movies we peer at the screen and think, “Did Marvel steal the whole expanded universe concept from Marilynne Robinson? Is Kevin Feige really just a Robinson superfan and is his expanded universe theorem for the characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe not just a ham-fisted money group but a secret tribute to the works of modern master Marilynne Robinson?” Regardless, Marilynne Robinson has a a new book out and it is set in the same world as Gilead and Homecoming and though it doesn’t feature Thanos snapping the world away, it does feature a star-crossed interracial relationship between John Ames Boughton (the son of Gilead’s preacher) and Della Miles, a high school teacher, and it will certainly be breathtaking and powerful and resonant in the madness of today and tomorrow and forever. Because c’mon, it’s Marilynne Robinson.

The Essential Ruth Stone
Bianca Stone (Ed.)
Copper Canyon Press

It becomes more and more apparent as we get older, as we pat ourselves on the back for reading another book, for chipping another notch in our all-consuming (and doomed) quest to read everything ever, that we know next to nothing about many things of the literary nature. Such as Ruth Stone, which the always-dependable Copper Canyon Press has deemed essential in this lovely collection of her work. Yet, prior to writing this column we didn’t know who Ruth Stone was, and now she is being deemed essential, and though I trust Copper Canyon Press with my poetry reading life (clearly not a life well lived if I’ve missed out on Ruth Stone) and that makes me feel like I am missing out on a lot. And that makes me anxious. But hey, Copper Canyon Press just put out, again, a beautiful collection of Ruth Stone’s work and if you like poetry that is both “dazzling” and “grief-stricken” (and we do, oh we do) then this collection (edited by her granddaughter Bianca) is up your alley.